lavaan is a free, open source R package for latent variable analysis. You can
use lavaan to estimate a large variety of multivariate statistical models,
including path analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation
modeling and growth curve models.
The lavaan package is developed to provide useRs, researchers and teachers a
free open-source, but commercial-quality package for latent variable modeling.
The long-term goal of lavaan is to implement all the state-of-the-art
capabilities that are currently available in commercial packages. However,
lavaan is still under development, and much work still needs to be done.
To get a first impression of how lavaan works in practice, consider the
following example of a SEM model (the Political Democracy Example from
Bollen's 1989 book):
library(lavaan)
model